Authors: Peter Weiss
covered with boils. This alloy of pain and pleasure set its stamp on the fantasies of my dissipations. I imagined myself imprisoned by violent, barbaric women who bound me and overwhelmed me with their cruel caresses. You need more fresh air, people said, when they noticed my hollow eyes, you need exercise and company. And so I was given a uniform, a neckerchief, a shirt with a fleur-de-lis badge on the breast pocket, a peaked hat, a knapsack, and a jackknife, and I was sent off with marching groups into the countryside. In the evenings Abi, the leader, crept under the blanket with me at the hostel and asked me if I wanted to be his adjutant. He embraced me with his hairy arms and legs, his bristly chin roamed over my face and his thick, red lips tried to kiss my mouth. I turned away from him but the voluptuous nauseating dream continued. We climbed naked in the trees, not in free, animal-like nakedness, but in a frantic feverish nakedness, we emptied our semen into the rough bark of the trees, we whipped each other with switches and wrestled with one another in burning lasciviousness in the moist warm earth, we burrowed our way through the woods, built shelters, stayed overnight in barracks where we learned to handle machine guns, and in the realization of my old war games I took part in an attack on the camp of an enemy group, we rushed out of our ambush over to their tents, plundered and sacked them, then as quick as lightning disappeared again into the woods. Close in front of me I still see the frightened face of a boy from whom, despite his pleadings, I wrested a carved staff, and then
possessed with the flush of victory rushed off with my loot. Like an evil omen this crying terror-stricken face now rose up in front of me, I felt that somewhere I was doing violence to myself, but I did not perceive it, I was caught up by a whirling hurricane. Everything was inflated and swollen. As I had myself been courted so now I courted another, moodily he let himself be kissed by me, then deceived me, looked from his embracing smilingly over to me, threw back his head with its long black hair and shut his eyes. Everything was filled with furtive enticements, advances, jealousies, and slanderings. Favorites were played off one against the other, and ingenious punishments devised for the scapegoats. All the destructiveness and lust for power in us was allowed to unfold. I became Friederle. I was there when a weak one was dragged to the stove and made to kiss the hot iron, I was there when we pushed a prisoner off on a raft on a flooded building site and pelted it with lumps of clay, I was filled with brief happiness to be able to be one of the strong ones, although I knew that my place was among the weaklings. As the sly and treacherous and sinister elements within us grew, we began to throw our weight about in the streets, fires were started, shop windows smashed, passersby were knocked down and flags were borne past to sarcastic cries of Hats off. Contorted in a cramp of reverence we sang the national anthem and heaven help him who did not bare his head. In the evenings in the blossoming avenues I swept out on my bicycle after the girls. But it seemed impossible ever to touch these shrinking figures with their darkly giggling
voices. Unattainable, I saw the brightness of their dresses dissolve into the depths of the leaf-shaded streets, dazed by the heavy scent of the blossom I heard soft steps beside me, heard the whispering of a tender voice in my ear, and ever more deeply I gave myself up to the hallucinations of the night till a dream being rose at my side, until I saw a face next to me, a face without features, a face that was a conglomeration of my own feelings, and I caressed this face, this face of self-love, no other face existed, thus I had to invent one, I kissed this face, I kissed the air, I kissed myself reeling under my need for love, and everything sank from me, the pressure of school, the threats and warnings, and I heard the demands of the world now only as a distant eternal surge. And I changed even this surge to my own purposes. In the evenings, alone in my room, a wild sea surrounded the island on which I lived with my beloved, here the waves had tossed us up onto the beach, and here we dwelt between the cliffs in a tumbledown hut, entirely given up to our mad love. It was complete love, hermaphroditic love, enclosed in itself, and self-consuming. My beloved was part of me, she was the female element in me, I knew every one of her movements, and she responded to every one of my movements. When I embraced her I embraced myself, offered myself, pressed into myself. And then, after the spilled happiness, the room resumed its shape, the terribly same old room, and destroyed my imaginings. The dream scattered like ashes and I lay and listened to the ticking of the clock in the hall. This wakeful loneliness was part of our
encounters, this was the price, that I had to lie awake a long time, with aching eyes, in a slow dying, in a slow inward decay. But next morning my longing for a new meeting made itself felt again and I waited impatiently for the evening. In the lethargic hour between two and three I lay on the sofa in the living room, with my hands folded under my head, staring up at the color print of Hannibal’s Tomb on the wall. Beneath a grayish brown, massive, many-branched tree there rose a heap of stones, next to which stood an old shepherd, leaning contemplatively on his crook, while before him a flock of sheep grazed in the wild, dry grass. The window onto the street stood open, outside motes of white sunlight danced, and from the tennis court on the opposite side of the road sounded the heavy, dull thuds of the ball being hit. Occasionally right beneath my window a car hummed past, or a bicycle bell rang. The thought of the city outside put new life into me, I saw in front of me the long, broad blocks of streets, the giant houses borne up by bent stone slaves, the castles, museums, monuments, and towers, the overhead railways on their viaducts and the underground railways with their bustling crowds and their rattling advertisement boards. I was about to get up when I saw my mother standing in front of me, I never noticed how she got into the room, she always appeared suddenly in the middle of the room as if she had grown out of the ground, dominating the room with her omnipotence. Have you done your homework, she asked, and I sank back into my weariness. Once again she asked, Have you already finished your homework.
Out of my indifference I answered, I’ll do it later. But she shouted, You’ll do it now. I’ll do it afterward, I said in a feeble attempt at defiance. Now she raised her fist, as in a coat of arms, and shouted her heraldic motto: I won’t put up with contradiction. She stepped up close to me and her words fell onto me like stones. You must plug and plug away, you will have a few years, then you’ll go out into life and for that you’ve got to be able to do something, otherwise you’ll go to rack and ruin. She pulled me to the desk, to the schoolbooks. You are not to let me down, she said, I suffer sleepless nights because of you, I’m responsible for you and if you’re a failure, it will reflect on me. Life means working, working, and then more working. Then she left me alone, next to me on a board stood a model city that I had constructed out of paper and cellophane, wires and rods. After my destructive games this was the first attempt to be constructive. It was a city of the future, a utopian metropolis, but it was incomplete, a mere skeleton, and I suddenly knew that I would not build at it any further, I saw only crumpled and glue-cracked paper, and everything was bent out of shape and fragile, one could blow it over with a single breath. I had to look for other means of expression. While I was brooding over my diary the door opened and my father entered. He saw me crouching over my desk busy with something in which he was never allowed to share, he saw how something quickly disappeared into the drawer. What are you up to over there, he asked. I’m doing my homework, I said. Yes, that is what I wanted to discuss with you, he said. There
was an embarrassing tension, as always with such discussions. You are old enough now, he said, for me to be able to discuss the problem of a career with you. What do you think you’d really like to do. I could not answer this painful question. With a voice that was meant to sound understanding, and had something of the man-to-man chat about it, he said, I suggest you go to Commerce High and then come into my office. I murmured something about wanting first to finish school, in this way I could at least gain time. My father said now with growing impatience, You don’t seem capable of doing that. I don’t believe you are talented enough for that, and as for studying you haven’t got the stamina, no, you ought to be doing some practical work. His face was gray and careworn. When one talks about life, one has to be gray and careworn. Life means seriousness, effort, responsibilities. My face, the face of a dunce and a loafer, twisted into an embarrassed stereotyped grin. In a hurt voice my father said, You don’t need to laugh, life’s not a laughing matter and it’s about time that you learned how to work properly. Perhaps he felt a twinge of tenderness for me, but when he saw my averted, hostile look, he had to make himself hard and show me how firm his will. With the palm of his hand he hit the table and cried out, When this school year is over, we’ll put an end to your daydreaming, then you’ll have to come to terms with the realities of life. The realities of life. On my father’s lips, these realities became a term for all that was sterile and petrified. I had already lost a decade in this reality, in the domain of school, where during
endless hours my senses had been deadened. The threat that I should have to go out into life meant merely a continuation of my long wandering through classrooms and echoing corridors. There, after all, we had been prepared, for proficiency and responsibility, as it was called, by teachers whose spirits had given out. These long stony passages, in which rows of animal-smelling raincoats hung, while from within behind the doors I heard the litany of the school children from which occasionally one single voice would ring out high and clear, these stony passages, paced by the all-seeing Headmaster under whose annihilating gaze I sank onto my knees, these stony passages, among the flagstones throughout which fossils were interspersed, millions of years old, shaped like comets. From here I was supposed to go on into the corridors of office blocks, to the filing cabinets, the clatter of typewriters, into the rooms where the business affairs of this world were handled. But I had found other things in my search for nourishment for my expanding needs, things that gave me answers to my questions, words of poetry that suddenly stilled my restlessness, pictures that took me up into them, music that touched an answering chord within me. In books I encountered the life that school had kept hidden from me. In books I was shown another reality of life than that into which my parents and teachers wanted to force me. The voices of books demanded my collaboration, the voices of books demanded that I open myself up and reflect upon myself. I hunted through my parents’ library. I was forbidden to read these books, so I had to remove them
secretly and carefully even out the gaps, my reading took place at night under the blankets by flashlight, or on the toilet seat, or camouflaged behind schoolbooks. The chaos within me of half-baked longings, of romantic extravagances, of terrors and wild dreams of adventure, was reflected back at me in countless mirrors, I preferred the seamy, the suggestive, the lurid, I sought after sexual descriptions, devoured the stories of courtesans and clairvoyants, of vampires, criminals, and libertines, and like a medium I found my way to the seducers and fantasts and listened raptly to them in my inner confusion and melancholy. But the more I became aware of myself, and the less I shrank back from myself, the stronger became my desire for the voice of the book to speak to me in the plainest terms and conceal nothing from me. Soon I could tell the character of the narration from the first words of a book. I wanted it to excite me straightaway, I wanted to feel its glow and inner conviction at once. Long descriptive passages made me impatient. I wanted to be drawn into the middle of things right from the very start, and to know at once what it was about. I read poems only rarely, for here everything was too highly wrought, too much subject to a formal framework. I distrusted well-rounded and perfected things and I found it tiresome to search for the hidden meaning beneath all the artistry and polish. Often the well-planned work of art left me cold while the raw and only half formed caught hold of me. My logical thinking was underdeveloped. When I tried to counteract this lack by reading scientific or philosophic works, the
letters blurred before my eyes, I could not piece them together into living words, I felt no breath in them. What I retained belonged less to the realm of general knowledge than to that of sensations, my knowledge was composed of picturelike experiences, of memories of sounds, voices, noises, movements, gestures, rhythms, of what I had fingered or sniffed, of glimpses into rooms, streets, courtyards, gardens, harbors, workshops, of vibrations in the air, of the play of light and shadow, of the movements of eyes, mouths, and hands. I learned that beneath logic there was another form of consistency, the consistency of inexplicable impulses; here I discovered my own nature, here in what was apparently unorganized, in a world that did not obey the laws of the external order. My thinking allowed no particular goal, but drove me from one to the other, tolerated no superimposed guidelines, often threw me into pitfalls and abysses from which no explanations but only secret, unexpectedly discovered paths could guide me out again. In the course of years the dialogue I sought for in books, in ever more decisive and immediate form, turned ever more deeply toward the personal sphere, and thus it became an ever rarer experience, for only a few could express some part of the things that touched the roots of being. All stages of my development have their own books. In Green Street there was a big book bound in yellow hardboard with the corners all nicked off and in it the adventures of little Mucki were reported. Mucki is a great hero, it said, he knocks off the heads of thistles in the field. I see him before me, Mucki in his baggy
cowboy trousers with leather fringes, with a broad-brimmed sombrero and a lasso, surrounded by cacti and rattlesnakes. Mucki was my first alter ego, in the malicious expression on his face was revealed what had been so well covered up in my own appearance, in him I could give full vent to my suppressed aggressiveness, Mucki the adventurer and gangster who was much more myself than the carefully groomed boy in the lace-collared blouse taken for Sunday strolls. Struwwelpeter, Dirty Peter, with his bushy forest of hair and his long fingernails, with his pals, for me stood for all my own weaknesses, fears and longings. The naïve, strong-colored pictures were like the scenery of my own dream. There were the cut-off bleeding thumbs and the big gaping shears ready to cut off more if they could, and there was Suppenkasper, the boy who just wouldn’t eat when he was told, with his strict, gaunt father and his plump mother, and his words, I won’t eat my supper, no, I won’t, were my own words, and it was myself who rocked back and forth on the chair and who, when he fell, dragged down with him the tablecloth with all the plates and dishes full of food. That was my revenge. That was what they got for all their scolding and admonishments. And then the idealization of dying. Starving was my retaliation, with this starvation I punished them, the lean man, the fat woman, sweet was the vengeance in which I myself was devoured. To see all this in pictures relieved me, part of the inward pressure had been conjured into externals. And others too could fly through the air, just look at the boy under the umbrella. My childhood is